Cull: Epitomes offers its reader, in a single volume, the essence of seventy-seven core philosophical and religious works. Each presents a thinker without knowledge of which one can scarcely begin to mull ethical and political questions. These vignettes span religious thought from pious wondering in the Indus valley to Buber's slippery mysticism. They measure politics from the olive groves of Athens to Harvard's intellectual ferment. These epitomes examine morality from the sacral smokes of the Sinai desert to E. O. Wilson's eusocial ants. These little works capture the texture, if not the entire fabric, of some of history's finest minds, and some painfully coarse ones as well. If time were abundant, you might read the originals yourself. Time, for most of us, is anything but abundant.